The new Culture Minister is Maria Miller. Her background is in marketing (Texaco and an ad agency) which means she’ll be in heaven when blather is required. She was born in Wolverhampton and is MP for Basingstoke, both places whose connections to Culture are so obvious they don’t need repeating here. She joined the Conservative Party aged 21 when Mrs […]
After a large sculpture was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire in 2005 security was tightened up. They have obviously enjoyed some success, if only because the works now getting stolen are a little smaller. The latest to disappear is a bronze sundial from the Yorkshire sculptor’s garden. Melted down, the 1965 piece will net the marvellous, highly […]
It won’t have escaped the eagle eyes of either of The Jackdaw’s readers that our favourite bit of raven-tressed gallery fluff, Griselda van Bonkhorst, resurfaced pretending to hold up Constable’s The Lock. She was last found swooning over a Rembrandt and before that upstaging a Stubbs with her impeccable embonpoint. What with her fashionably unironed T-shirt and sexy rubber gloves […]
Glyn Thompson, the pickler’s first teacher, sets the artist’s early record straight… Hirst scholars will have noted a change in the authorised chronology in the Tate Modern Hirst retrospective catalogue to a venerable biographical item, the entry for March 2002 (The Reliance, Leeds). In the corrected Tate chronology the former title, Damien Hirst’s Art Education, now reads as Fountain Footnotes […]
Today John Constable’s The Lock, painted in 1824, sold at Christie’s for £22.4 million. In the current art market of silly prices some lucky person got the bargain of their lives. Let us hope the picture will be placed in a museum, where people might enjoy it, instead of disappearing into a Swiss warehouse as the investment bauble of some […]
The Weiwei soap opera continues with more plots than Highgate Cemetery. He has now been refused permission to attend his own tax hearing. He is, of course, contesting the imposition of a fine made by the Chinese Government for alleged tax evasion and other financial exoticisms. In his turn Weiwei has issued a writ against the state for violating the […]
62 pictures, the most ever in its 60-year history, have been selected for this year’s John Moores Prize, the winner of which is announced on September 13th. The Jackdaw had heard of five of the 62. 40 years ago we would have heard of all fifty artists, and each represented by one of their better efforts. The exhibition at the […]
Brian Lewis, Pontefract’s poet laureate and a painter to boot, bravely exposed the neglect of local artists when the visiting functionaries of State Art arrived for the opening of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield In the cultural war which challenges the dominance of the London art world we are the first shock troops of a new guerilla army which urges […]
Brian Lewis, poet and painter of Pontefract and champion of regional arts, reflects upon the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield, home town of the eponymous sculptor “Inside it is beautiful” The PR company who is responsible for naming the new Wakefield Art Gallery which is rising on land between the canal and the River Calder has decided to call it ‘Hepworth’ […]
… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. DEGAS & GARTERS I knew there’d be trouble, the minute I heard the Keepers were bringing Old Edgar back to the Zoo on Piccadilly. ‘Degas & The Ballet’ sounds good, and is good, because […]
